Tim Banks is the CEO of APM, a Canada wide construction and property development company, with its head office in Charlottetown, PEI. My family has lived on PEI for over eight generations and I was born at the Prince County Hospital in Summerside, PEI. I am hoping someone will soon develop a blood test to authenticate when you actually become an "Islander" as I am still having problems explaining where I'm from?

Monday, June 9, 2008

Nowadays I'm finding myself scanning the electronic media for the latest news mostly before heading to bed or when I get up early in the morning and it seems every weekend CBC goes dead on the news while the Guardian continues to post the latest news. I decided before putting my pen to these comments that I should actually test this out before making any comments, so this weekend I started reviewing both the Guardian's and CBC's web site starting at 6:00 pm on Friday until 7:00 am on Monday. My previous observations were dead on, the CBC must lock the place up when they leave on Friday as all the posts remain the same and there is very little news while the Guardian continues to post short captions of the latest local and national news. It appears that the Guardian have some of their roving reporters working on stories through the weekend which they obviously file and send a copy to their web site manager who post them when they come in. I would have thought the CBC in this age of electronic media would have been able to easily allow their reporters to post directly to their local site. I was curious about my observations so I spoke to a retired CBC staffer who suggested that the issue may not be the staff not knowing how to file the reports on the weekend but more than likely there are no staff working on the weekend!!! How do they expect to keep an audience interested if they close up shop on the weekends? It seems a little funny that a print media, being the Guardian, is outflanking a media that was built on an electronic platform. The former staffer suggested that CBC budgets and the unwillingness of staff to work weekends without overtime are probably the root of the problem but my feeling is that if they don't soon correct it their audience will abandon them for other media. CBC may not be able to extract more money from Ottawa under the current regime so they may have to get creative with what they have and figure out how to deliver on the weekends or they will be playing into the hands of their detractors and we will lose this institution. Well I'm off to work and I'll have to grab the Guardian to get "the rest of the story"....

1 comment:

Statler
said...

I’m happy to see someone else complaining about this, I’ve been baffled by this for some time. I can tell you why CBC doesn’t update on the weekends, no body works on the weekends…. they aren’t reporters first, they’re civil servants first. I don’t buy the budget constraints either; they are well compensated in comparison to other local and regional media, but there aren’t any incentives to get the big scoop, no circulation or viewership numbers to worry about.

I usually check the CBC a few times a day, read the headlines, leave the odd comment, check out what others are saying about the issues. Saturday morning rolls around and it’s a ghost town. This weekend I’m taking my viewing business to CTV for the first time… I don’t know if they update on the weekends either, if they do they may get my weekday business as well.